Saturday, 30 August 2014

The Rue Honteuse - literally, the Street of
Shame – leads straight to the gate of St. Bertulphe’s church at Doudeauville, a
village in the Vallée de la Course. I have
been staying there this month. The river Course itself, really no more than a babbling
brook, rises above Desvres and runs down through the valley to Montreuil-sur-Mer.
In front of the church stands one of the most remarkable war memorials I have
seen in France. Topped by a lowering, almost life-size Calvary (calvaires – monumental crucifixes –
abound in this part of France), the plinth on which the Calvary stands is a
brightly decorated memorial repainted for the centenary of La Grande Guerre .

The plinth is octagonal. Facing the visitor
who approaches the church, a bronze (but only bronze-painted) medallion depicts
the profile of a cheerful French poilu.
No mournful hero he. He has a flourishing moustache and his Adrian (the distinctive French helmet)
is held in place by a tightly buckled chinstrap. Beneath the medallion are the
words

DOUDEAUVILLE

A
SES

GLORIEUX
ENFANTS

MORTS

POUR
LA PATRIE

1914-1918

and underneath this inscription, two
crossed banners with the French tricoleur.
On either side of this first face are panels listing the dead: thirty men
between 1914- 1920. On the remaining sides of the plinth are a jaunty
procession of palms, medals, ribbons, flags, grenades and shell heads — altogether a carnivalesque fusion of high patriotism and folk art.

Churchyard and church offer plenty of
evidence of war both before and after 1914-18. The church’s

walls, north and
south, are pockmarked with dents and holes from musket balls, as if at some
time the church has been besieged – did the villagers ever have to take refuge
there, sometime in the 17th or 18th century? Who was shooting
at whom? And why? It looks as though later generations of schoolboys have
gouged most of the balls out with knives, but some shot still remains embedded
in the chalky material of which the walls are made. Indeed, the walls have
proved irresistible to the young of Doudeauville: dates as far back as 1670 are
clearly visible, and I was touched to see a discreet and hastily-carved little
inscription: Pierre à Renée 1737. Nearby, however, deeply
incised and in large letters, someone had carved out the admonition, ‘NASCI EST
MORI’ – ‘To be born is to die’. How many villagers in Doudeauville at any time
before the First World War would have been able to read, let alone write,
Latin? It reminded me of Pozzo’s gloomy summing up of life in Waiting for Godot—

They give birth astride a
grave. The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

Graves and gravestones in northern French
churchyards are usually large flat tomb chests, set low into the ground, and
those in Doudeauville are no exception. On top of each one, family and friends place
small engraved plaques expressing affection (‘Chère grandmère’ etc.). Sometimes old soldiers pay
their respects: ‘Á notre camarade’. On several tombs here, however, I
saw a message I’d not noticed before. The wording was always the same: ‘Les Prisonniers 1939-1945’. It was a
reminder that Doudeauville had been a village firmly under German control
during the Second World War, and that most of its men would have been deported
to work as forced labour elsewhere in occupied Europe. One name indeed had been
added to the village war memorial with the inscription ‘Mort en déportation’.

Then I noticed an older gravestone whose
faded lettering took a moment to decipher:

Á la Memoire

de
Eugene Eurin

Mort
Pour La France

à Tahure

Le
31 Octobre 1915

à l’âge de 20 ans.

I confess, to my shame, I had never heard
of Tahure, which just shows how little I know about the First World War from
any point of view apart from a British one. The German army captured Tahure, a
small village about 40km east of Reims, in September 1914 and held on to it
until 28th September 1918. The fighting around it throughout the war
was so devastating and costly that a French national necropolis and a huge
memorial were erected there in 1924. Apparently there was a time when being
able to say “I was at Tahure” was as much a badge of honour as saying “I was at
Verdun”.

I have felt a strange compulsion to
discover as much as I can about Tahure – and about Eugene Eurin, whose name was
added as an afterthought to his family gravestone, and (I was surprised to see)
doesn’t appear on the Doudeauville war memorial at all. But he was born, I have
found, not in Doudeauville but in nearby Bécourt in 1895; and when called up on his twentieth birthday he was
living in Zoteaux, over the hill and five miles away. Aged 20, he would have travelled
to Abbeville (probably the longest journey of his life thus far, about 40
miles) to enlist in his local regiment, the 328e
Régiment d’Infanterie. He is described in
the French
Army records as a soldier ‘2me Classe’,
still deemed to be a recruit at the time of his death ‘Au Front’. Indeed, when whatever happened to him at Tahure
happened, he had been in the army only four months.

Actually, we know quite a lot (from the
official record at least) about what happened – to the regiment, if not to
Eugene Eurin. They acquitted themselves so well on October 30th and
31st, that General
Pétain
himself wrote formally to congratulate the 328e on adding ‘une page
glorieuse a son historique’.In his
dispatch, he described the action in graphic terms I translate loosely thus:

Despite an
unceasing and ferocious bombardment by shells and poison gas, a bombardment
which entirely destroyed trenches, lines of communication and dug-outs, decimating
its effective fighting strength … the 328th R.I. not only maintained
a completely unbroken front but inflicted enormous losses on the enemy.

That describes just two days of the
fighting; after four years Tahure had all but disappeared. The official
Tahure website paints a bleak picture of the desolation of a village ‘anéanti [obliterated] sous le feu constant des canons, occupé par les
Allemands dés le 2 Septembre 1914 jusqu’a 28 Septembre 1918,’ and whose population ‘s’est
despersée et en majeure partie déportée.’ It continues
(my translation again):

Once the war was
over, little by little the population returned. All the houses had been
destroyed, the fields had been furrowed into trenches and then filled up with
shells, mines and the shattered remains of human bodies ….

The phrase I’ve translated as ‘furrowed
into trenches’ is ‘sillonnés de tranchées’. I suspect an ironic nod here in the direction of La Marseillaise:

Aux armes, citoyens,

To arms, citizens,

Formez vos bataillons,

Form your battalions,

Marchons, marchons !

Let's march, let's march!

Qu'un sang impur

Let an impure blood

Abreuve nos sillons !

Water our furrows!

Did Eugene Eurin, I wonder, sing those words
as he marched towards Tahure? There is a remarkable collection
of sepia photographs taken at the Front and even in the trenches of Tahure
in 1915: I’d like to think his face might appear in one of them: there are few
enough other surviving traces of his existence. As far as I can discover, he
has no known grave. Perhaps he was caught in one of those trenches destroyed by
shelling; probably his was one of the shattered bodies littering the fields when
the war was over. I’d like to go to Tahure one day, and see the place for
myself. All I can say for a fact is that Eugene Eurin is recorded on the war
memorial of Zoteaux – but only just: unlike the flamboyant memorial at Doudeauville,
the sombre stonework of the little roadside obelisk at Zoteaux is crumbling,
and his name has all but disappeared.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk